The years after the Second World War left the United States optimistic about atomic energy. Bombs had ended a war, but government scientists were soon asking whether the same technology could also dig canals, carve harbors or unlock resources buried too deep for ordinary drills to reach. That optimism took shape in Operation Plowshare, a program the Atomic Energy Commission ran through the 1960s and early 1970s to test peaceful uses for nuclear explosives. One of its strangest chapters unfolded in western Colorado, where the government tried to free a stubborn pocket of natural gas with a bomb.
A blast beneath the Rockies
The target was a rock formation near Rulison, close to present-day Parachute in Garfield County. Engineers believed enormous reserves of natural gas were trapped there, but the rock was so tight and impermeable that conventional wells could barely extract any gas. On the tenth of September 1969, workers lowered a nuclear device with a yield around 40 kilotons into a well roughly 8,426 feet underground and detonated it. The plan, drawn from an earlier and less successful test in New Mexico called Project Gasbuggy, was that the explosion would fracture the surrounding rock and let gas migrate more freely towards a well that could be produced commercially. According to the Office of Legacy Management, the Atomic Energy Commission carried out the detonation as the second of three planned natural gas reservoir stimulation experiments. Families living within a few miles of the site had objected loudly beforehand, worried about contamination and ground tremors, and some had even taken their concerns to court before the test went ahead. At first, the results appeared promising. The explosion opened up the rock, and gas began flowing toward the surface in quantities that suggested the concept might actually work at scale.
Gas that nobody could sell
That early promise ran into an immovable problem once the gas reached the surface. The blast left the gas laced with radioactive tritium, a byproduct of the nuclear reaction that could not be removed with the technology of the era. Research compiled through the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information noted that radionuclide levels in the produced gas stayed above what regulators considered acceptable for public use, which meant the gas could never legally reach a stove or furnace. Operators eventually flared much of the gas, burning off the resource the experiment was meant to capture. Public opposition grew as it became clear that even trace radioactivity in household fuel was unacceptable to many Americans. A third and final test in the same program, Project Rio Blanco, went ahead near Rifle in 1973, but nuclear fracturing was already losing support as an industrial idea.
An AI-generated representative image of the Rulison gas-experiment site near Parachute, Colorado, where an underground nuclear blast fractured the rock to release trapped natural gas. Credits – Google Gemini
A fence that still standsDecades on, the Rulison site has not been abandoned entirely. The Department of Energy completed an initial cleanup of the surface area in 1998, but the ground itself remains under long-term watch. A modest monument marks the spot today behind a fence on private land, with a plaque recording the details of the blast. Government regulators still require energy companies to clear special hearings before drilling within half a mile of the site, and monitoring wells continue tracking whether any radioactive material has moved through the groundwater. Residents who lived through the detonation recalled feeling a slow tremor spread through the ground, with rockslides shaking loose from nearby cliffs as the shockwave passed beneath them. More than fifty years later, the Piceance Basin remains one of Colorado’s more active gas-producing regions, but not because of the nuclear experiment that once tried to unlock it. Engineers eventually found that hydraulic fracturing using water and sand could reach the same tight formations without leaving radioactive contamination behind, and that is largely how gas beneath Rulison and nearby fields is produced today.
